‘A woman needs a door so that she can lock everyone else out,’ she said to me, before her a delicate coffee cup and a pastry covered in green marzipan, and I thought about the cupboard where I had hidden raisins and nuts against the days when my mother’s eyes turned into cold, gleaming coins. I never told Granny about those days, even when she squeezed my hand as gently as she could with her bony bird-fingers and said: ‘Remember, won’t you, that you can tell me everything?’
But I knew I couldn’t tell her about my mother. I knew that it was my job to protect her, to keep secret the moments that were too ugly for anyone else’s eyes, to hide the image of my mother that only I could see.
That flat, the little room and kitchen alcove for which Granny saved all her life and of which she was, right up to her death, enormously proud, was now being searched by the police. They were searching Aslak’s computer and phone for images, messages and websites he had visited, everything he had written or read, everything he had left behind him. Every morning Granny had dusted the bookshelves, displaying the porcelain cats and dogs she had collected, and the glass ball in which snow fell on two skating girls when you shook it. She would stand, wearing her apron, in the kitchen alcove, cooking French toast and listening to a talk programme on the radio. She would open the window and whisper to me: ‘Listen. A nightingale.’
What would she have said if she had known what was happening in her flat now?
PART
Four
However, no country will be immune to the violent consequences of global climate change.
CRAIG A. ANDERSON and MATT DELISI
‘Implications of Global Climate Change for Violence in Developed and Developing Countries’, ‘Implications of Global Climate Change for Violence’
(Iowa State University)
35
Human filth. Secret group.
Übermensch:
What’s this all about?
AryanKing:
It’s not about anything.
Übermensch:
Why didn’t you come yesterday?
StateIsMyBitch: We did. We went to a different place.
Übermensch:
What am I not getting?
AryanKing:
We wanted to go on without you.
Übermensch:
What?
StateIsMyBitch: You know.
Übermensch:
I don’t.
AryanKing:
We can’t afford to keep your sort with us.
Übermensch:
What sort?
StateIsMyBitch: Losers.
AryanKing:
Psychos.
Übermensch:
Is this a joke?
StateIsMyBitch: Don’t play dumb.
Übermensch:
What?
AryanKing:
WHATWHATWHAT? The pills. The loony bin. Half a year off university.
Übermensch:
Who told you?
StateIsMyBitch: Well, it certainly wasn’t you. If it was, we might even respect you.
AryanKing:
Maybe.
Übermensch:
That was a long time ago.
StateIsMyBitch: Why didn’t you tell us?
Übermensch:
It never occurred to me. I didn’t think it mattered.
AryanKing:
No? ‘What would society really lose if the weaker elements were allowed to fade away naturally?’ A direct quote from you.
Übermensch:
So what?
StateIsMyBitch: You’re the weaker element.
36
Beautiful death. Secret group.
Someoneisoutthere: Why did you change your name?
Earthsong:
I realised it was stupid.
Someoneisoutthere: It was about time.
Earthsong:
Oh, you think so too?
Someoneisoutthere: Absolutely.
Earthsong:
Why didn’t you say?
Someoneisoutthere: I knew you would realise it for yourself.
Earthsong:
Nice that there’s someone who has faith in my intelligence.
Someoneisoutthere: Absolutely. Your intelligence and your heart.
Earthsong:
Are things going better?
Someoneisoutthere: A black eye.
Earthsong:
Again?
Someoneisoutthere: It won’t end until I die.
Earthsong:
You’ve got to object!
Someoneisoutthere: I daren’t.
Earthsong:
You’ve got to. It will kill you otherwise. Don’t give it that satisfaction.
37
Someoneisoutthere:
I left today.
Earthsong:
For good?
Someoneisoutthere:
For good.
Earthsong:
Where are you?
Someoneisoutthere:
Safe.
Earthsong:
Definitely?
Someoneisoutthere:
Definitely.
Earthsong:
Fantastic! My brave girl!
Someoneisoutthere:
Say it again.
Earthsong:
What?
Someoneisoutthere:
MY girl.
Earthsong:
MY girl.
Someoneisoutthere:
Thank you.
38
Earthsong. That is the name which his friends called him. Before that he was Übermensch, but that was a stupid, ridiculous and childish phase. At that time his thinking was immature, still forming and everything about him fragile and easily fooled. He scorns the self of that period; scorns his friends who claimed to be his friends but weren’t, who read Ayn Rand and parroted Nietzsche’s thoughts without understanding anything about them and believed themselves to be special, those whom nature had selected to win.
His new friends live in London, Buenos Aires, New York, Cape Town and Delhi, and he has not met any of them. His friends have names like Sturmunddrang, Killthemall and Elmundo. In their pictures they look like he does in his: pale and dark eyed in their black clothes; the photographs are so skilfully lit and edited that only carefully highlighted parts of their faces are visible. He likes photographs like that. They show enough, but not too much; the face is left to the viewer’s imagination and that is exactly what he has always wanted, that the environment and people should be under the cover of darkness, that everything should not be so unprotected and on show, that people should close their mouths, hide their faces and keep their feelings and their thoughts to themselves.
This society of pseudonymous, unknown friends in their dramatically lit photographs is the first group to which he has felt he belongs, the first cohort of people with whom, in conversation, he has been able to forget himself, his complete outsiderdom, and concentrate on exchanging ideas.
He converses with them from the small flat on whose hall floor his granny was found dead. The flat’s windows have been closed for so long that when you come in you are met by the stink of sweat, beer and banana skins that are growing green fuzz. But the only people who come in from outside are the pizza delivery man and the shop delivery man; Mum tries sometimes, but he always finds a reason to stop her, and he himself goes out as seldom as possible. The flat is his nest; he tries to make it as cosy and warm as the covers he and his sister curled up under as children.
He has talked to his friends a bit about music, books and movies, and very little about family, friends or girl-or boyfriends. They have talked a lot about the environment and violence. They have shared pictures of cities inundated by floods, destroyed mining areas, earth cracked with drought. He has searched for romantic pictures of forests, a tree flowering in the middle of a polluted city, a chameleon on a bush branch. They have written about Osama bin Laden, Ulrike Meinhof and young men dressed in long black coats who shot persons known and unknown in schools, u
niversities or on the street. Some of them admire those men, some despise them.
‘Violence must have some greater aim. Shooting people just because you’re pissed off or want revenge is just as pathetic as being obsessed by clothes made in sweatshops or showing off with an expensive handbag.’
That is what he wrote after a young Finnish man stole a rifle from the army and traipsed through the forest to a class reunion to shoot his former classmates.
That was when Saharaflower appeared on his screen for the first time.
‘I agree,’ wrote the girl, whom he had never talked to before.
‘Violence is acceptable as a political tool, not as an instrument for one’s own therapy or to prop up a broken ego.’
Saharaflower’s picture was different from the others’. It was taken in natural light in Libya, at the gate of the medieval town of Ghadames. Her eyes, which were looking straight at the camera, looked open and brave, ready to take on anyone and everyone. Saharaflower had pale skin and dark eyes and her face was framed by a silver, glimmering scarf; on her head were sunglasses decorated with diamonds. The girl’s cheekbones were high and a smile rippled across her full lips. The girl looked as if she belonged in an advertisement or one of the countless music videos in which women in headscarves perform fast-paced songs about hatred.
He responded quickly.
‘Good that there’s someone who understands. I’m perturbed by people who love violence for its own sake. Or who think it is the ultimate way of getting attention.’
‘Same here. Here too there are far too many guys who think that killing someone is a good way of putting a plaster on their own egos.’
‘I’ll kill others so that I will finally be noticed.’
‘Those clowns use the number of their victims to compete.’
‘Exactly. Never mind about the content, as long as you kill more people than someone else.’
‘As long as I can get the world’s attention for myself for a moment.’
‘Pathetic.’
‘They think they’re doing something amazing. Revolutionary. Really it’s just this narcissistic, attention-seeking culture, spreading its pictures everywhere and measuring its own well-being with millions of different yardsticks, taken to its extreme.’
‘I’ll kill them all, because I’m worth it.’
When they had finished their conversation, his face felt odd. Unknowingly, he had begun to smile.
On the day when the voyage to the North Pole began, he wrote to his friend, his fingers trembling.
‘For 130,000 years nothing like this has happened. Massive. Who is following this?’
‘The Greenpeace ship is going.’
‘Hippies are staging performances at the harbour.’
‘PERFORMANCES?! No fucking way.’
‘Hippies will save the world by painting themselves green and standing on their heads.’
‘How long do they intend to go on?’
‘A couple of generations more?’
‘The blood will go to their heads.’
‘That will make a good cocktail, mixed with piss.’
‘This really is crushing.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘When I was a child, my mother told me that the melting of the ice so you could sail to the North Pole would be the last straw. That it would make humankind realise that we don’t have time to think about what to do: we have to act. That then, at the very latest, everyone would have to understand that if we go on as before, civilisation will be destroyed.’
‘And now it’s happening.’
Saharaflower had joined the conversation.
He looked at the girl smiling on the screen for a long time. As he breathed it felt as if someone were blowing up a balloon inside him. Warmth rose to his cheeks and he wrote his response quickly and calmly.
‘It is happening. And nothing is changing. The decision makers are talking about the same things as twenty years ago. And most people believe that all consumption means is calories, and emissions are their own farts.’
‘I won’t even say what I’d like to do to the guys who imagine they are promoting some political goal with performances!’
‘I can imagine what you’re not saying. It’s exactly that attitude that makes our generation mere losers. People think that performance and action are the same thing. That the fact that I pay attention to something (i.e. I have an opinion about something) can really have an effect.’
‘I think those guys don’t even imagine that. Most people our age don’t even think about action, only performance. There is just the self performing some opinion or emotion.’
He wrote it with his heart pounding, his limbs burning with the thought that on the other side of the world there was a wide-eyed girl who was interested in what he had to say.
‘Exactly. At one time people took photographs to communicate something about the world to others, some fleeting observation or moment. Our parents’ generation turned the camera on themselves, and now a photograph means a picture of me doing something.’
‘It’s the same now with violent attacks. Instead of being a means of attaining a goal, there’s just me me me being violent.’
‘It’s exactly that that makes the school killers despicable. Violence is the strongest political resource. It is unforgivably pathetic to use it because I want revenge because I have been treated wrongly.’
‘Real terrorists have something bigger than themselves. Religion or an ideal on account of which they kill.’
‘What do you think of it as a means?’
‘Terrorism?’
‘Violence.’
‘Historically it hasn’t been very successful.’
‘Depends on your point of view. For example the Nazis succeeded, at the beginning, very well in their own terms. North Korea has succeeded from the point of view of its leaders for a phenomenally long time. ISIS succeeded revolutionarily well. And if you think about us, too, Gaddafi’s government stayed in power precisely because of its all-pervasive, tightly controlled machine of violence. From his point of view it, too, was highly successful.’
Something in the girl’s words was at the same time frightening and fascinating. He could almost feel her slim fingers around his arm, pulling him towards some new, unknown path.
‘I don’t completely agree with their aims.’
‘But that wasn’t the point.’
‘What was?’
‘The fact that the success of violence depends on your viewpoint. Think of the world as a whole. Power rests with those who have the strongest and most effective machinery of violence. I’d be prepared to bet that from the point of view of the USA, for example, violence, or at least the control of an effective machinery of violence, has achieved a great deal.’
They exchanged messages all night long about the melting of the ice caps and the nature of political violence. In the early hours they told each other jokes which were not particularly good, but whose cleverness each of them praised because they wanted to please the other. And they talked about what the stars look like above the desert surrounding Ghadames, what it is like to climb the dunes and slide down them and how it feels to stay awake on the shore of a Finnish lake until the rising sun bleaches the summer night into morning and mist moves on the surface of the lake. When they finally finished the conversation to go to sleep, it was already morning. Sunlight pene-trated into his room despite the blackout curtains he had so carefully closed. Generally the light hurt his eyes, but now he slept a deep sleep until the afternoon and, when he woke, he opened the windows as he had not done in a long time, took a shower and went out.
That day he walked around the city as if in a foreign country, strolling in the parks and along the shore and stopping to feed the mallards and to look at people, drink coffee from paper cups and buy ice cream from the kiosk he had visited as a child with his father, his mother and his sister the first time he had been able to ride a bike without stabilisers. With the spring wind o
n his face he thought about riding fast and far away, leaving his family behind and zooming on his little bike towards unknown countries. It was comforting that the kiosk was still in the same place, the same metal chairs under the canopy as when he was little, at the back of the kiosk a shelf of liquorice sweets.
He walked around the city until sunset, imagining himself to be an alien from outer space, one for whom the human body was borrowed and who followed the sad, happy, dreaming and absent-looking people around him with an outsider’s interest, without any idea of the nature of the fear and grief of human life.
When he returned home in the evening, Saharaflower was already waiting for him. Generally he conversed with his new friends in open chats, but now Saharaflower had sent him a private message.
‘It was nice to chat yesterday,’ she said.
‘Yes, it was,’ he replied.
‘I felt you understand a bit better than the others.’
‘Same here.’
The tips of his fingers were sweating. Even though Saharaflower was only a picture on a screen, he felt that he had never got so close to a girl. His only experiences of girls were frosty humiliations. After them he had hated his body so much that, in his darker moments, he had wanted to kill himself; in lighter ones he had wanted to leave his body behind and merge his mind to become part of a computer. He was sure that no one would ever desire his touch, no one would kiss him, no one would grasp his hand and take him to a place where they could undress each other in peace. He was sure that he would never wake up naked next to another naked person, never fall asleep with another person’s back against his belly. He was sure that no one would ever say ‘I love you’ to him, that he would never say it to anyone.
Saharaflower’s smile was sunny and her gaze open, her words easy to respond to. She sent pictures of the desert with waves like the sea, and the old town of Ghadames, on the roofs of whose white, lime-washed buildings only women had long ago been allowed to walk.
‘There’s always someone to say what girls can or can’t do,’ Saharaflower said. ‘But when I have done what I am planning to do, they will be silenced for ever.’
When Time Runs Out Page 13